Bernard Bolter

photo and acrylic on canvas

I work somewhere between the mediums of digital photography and painting. In my latest work, the Digital City Series, I use cites as the raw material and inspiration for a collection of photographic collages. The urban landscape is cut-up and re-constructed into familiar, yet surreal manifestations of the city experience. I am based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, since 2007, where I attended the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie.

Born and raised in San Francisco, California, I began painting in my early twenties. Studying on my own after high school, I took painting up as a way to express and respond to the various philosophical and artistic theories that I was reading at the time. After creating a significant body of raw work, I began to expose in various cafes and bars in San Francisco, including the old north beach hangout Vesuvius. In 1996, I performed the Action of hanging one of my paintings in the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the painting was discovered and kept by the museum. After this, I moved to Europe.

After traveling around the European continent for some time, I finally settled in the Netherlands and attended the Hoge School voor de Kunsten in Utrecht for one year. This is where my interest in computers began, after creating a couple of websites on my own, I left the school to work as an Art Director for an website company in Amsterdam, AbFab. In 2000, I left Europe for the states, to join the Global Peace Walk 2000, which was a pray for peace, that involved walking from San Francisco to New York.

After the walk, I settled in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where I began to work on various techniques, involving digital photography and painting. In 2003, with four other brooklyn artists, I founded Art Collision, which went on to have a totally self supported art tour that exhibited in America and Europe. After the first Collision tour, I began the Vanishing Landscape series, which are paintings with one photograph transferred to the canvas and then painted with acrylic paint. The term "vanishing landscape" refers to both the way in which the perspectives of the photo are drawn into the fields of paint, and also the permanence issue that arises from using digitally printed images. The Vanishing Landscape Series now consists of paintings from New York, San Francisco and Amsterdam, and has also been exhibited in these places respectively.